


God Rest Ye Merry

by mombasas



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - After College/University, Christmas, Claudia Stilinski's Death, Haunting, Huddling For Warmth, Hypothermia, M/M, Not really an AU, Pack Family, Poltergeists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 08:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14492934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mombasas/pseuds/mombasas
Summary: Stiles comes back to Beacon Hills for the holidays, and the phrase "Christmas spirit" gets a bit too literal for anyone's taste.





	God Rest Ye Merry

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in some nebulous canon-divergent universe where Boyd and Erica and Allison all survive, and the pack disperses to attend college but still comes back together over the holidays each year. My original plan was for this to be a much longer story, but it's been sitting on my computer for years and I think it's time I let it go.

When Stiles lets himself into the apartment Lydia is in the kitchen, his green apron tied neatly around her waist and flour smudged adorably across her cheek. The MIT college radio station is playing. Early winter sunlight trickles in from the window over the sink. There’s a stemless glass and half-empty wine bottle sitting out on the counter. Six years ago, a domestic image like that would have sent him into an hour-long daydream. Instead, it sparks a frission of unease. Lydia turns around and looks at him seriously, hips and shoulders still rolling to the music.

“You ain’t gotta tell me, I know this pussy be yankin’,” she informs him, using the whisk as a microphone. Batter drips onto the linoleum. As distractions go, it’s a pretty good one, but Stiles’ spidey-sense is tingling. He drops his bag on the hardwood floor and almost trips over himself in his hurry to inspect the mixing bowl. “Don’t start, Stiles,” Lydia warns, drooping a little. She turns the radio down and scowls into the bowl. Its contents look like they’re scowling back.

“Is it supposed to be viscous?” he asks, yanking his scarf off one-handed. Years of practice mean that he’s able to dodge her irritated swat at his head. “Just kidding, it looks amazing!” he says, backing away with his hands raised defensively. He scoops up his bag and retreats into his room grinning to himself. Lydia is perfect in each and every possible way, and she can’t bake to save her life.

They’ve been sharing this apartment for over three years, since their sophomore year at school. It’s small but clean, in part thanks to the Roomba Erica sent him as a joke for Christmas last year. Stiles has taken to calling it Derek, because he knows it pisses Lydia off, and placing little bowls of trail mix or M&Ms on top of it. He’s only seen her make an undignified lunge for it once, but it was worth it. The space is cozy, even if his room is a little messy—his desk is a relatively clean island surrounded by piles of books that spread out like a blast radius.

Stiles nudges one of the piles with his foot to make room for his bag, tossing the scarf onto a chair and unzipping his jacket. He allows himself to sag down onto the bed for a moment before sitting bolt upright. His eyes narrow and he gets to his feet again, padding to the doorway.

“Why,” he asks suspiciously, “are you baking?”

“No reason!” Lydia says, keeping her back to him. Stiles’ already-narrowed eyes become an approximation of Leonardo DiCaprio’s squint. He walks over warily. Lydia never bakes unless something’s wrong, because she hates being bad at things.

“Lydia…”

She turns to look at him with a beatific and completely fake smile. “Can’t I just do something nice for my favorite roommate? Try it, I think I’m getting better.” Stiles, eyeing the pulverized remnants of eggshell scattered like shrapnel on the counter, doubts it. 

“Just tell me, Lyds. Put me out of my misery. Oh my god, did you hear something? Is someone dying? Did Rohaid come back?” Rohaid is a pushy local alpha who occasionally forgets that major cities are free territory, and therefore occasionally receives a blast in the eyeballs from Lydia’s wolfsbane-laced mace canister. It’s been going on for years. Stiles is pretty sure that, at this point, he puts up with the injury just to bask in Lydia’s presence for a few moments. Stiles gets it.

“What? No,” Lydia waves him off. “I told Allison about The Thing.” The capital letters are audible, if only because they’ve both been using them for weeks now.

Stiles makes a noise of distress. If Allison knows then it’s only a matter of time until Scott knows, and Scott will tell Isaac who will, of course, inform Derek, at which point Stiles’ ass is, metaphorically, grass. “Lydia nooooo,” he says.

“Sorry,” she says, unrepentant. “You know I can’t keep a secret.” That part is also a bald-faced lie. Lydia is the most enigmatic out of all of them, other than maybe Boyd, whose secrecy is borne of a taciturn disposition rather than pure contrariness. Stiles is pretty sure Lydia does it for the challenge. Keeping secrets is hard when you’re part of a werewolf pack with five walking lie detectors and Allison, who is basically a professional assassin these days. Senior year, nobody even knew university Lydia had chosen to attend until Stiles bumped into her in the baggage claim at Logan. She’d run over his foot with an expensive Zegna rolling luggage and he’d limped for a week. Stiles is still unsure if it had been intentional.

“It’ll be fine, don’t be an infant,” Lydia says when he gives her his most betrayed look. “You were going to talk to Deaton anyway.”

“I know,” Stiles gripes. “I just hate admitting weakness.”

“That’s why we’re friends,” Lydia agrees. “But nothing’s worked so far and I don’t have time to translate more useless Sumerian this month. I have that symposium in January and I’m already super stressed.”

Stiles squashes the feeling of guilt that her words inspire. She’s doing it on purpose and besides, she’s right—Deaton’s library is probably their best bet at this point.

Their apartment is maybe, kind of, a little bit haunted. It had started small, small enough to miss. Stiles has only been able to put the pieces together backwards, reviewing his memories carefully like security tape footage. Little things, like waking up to a cool wind on his face and discovering that the standing fan in his room had turned on during the night and was oscillating loudly, sending sheets of paper wafting from his desk to the floor. Like their heavy, ancient windows slamming shut with nobody nearby. Lydia complaining about finding new, dark bruises in the shower, even though she’d been buried under piles of grading all weekend and hadn’t had any drunken shenanigans to justify them. Stiles coming home from work to find that all of their plates, mugs, and cutlery had flown violently out of the cabinets to create a minefield of shattered glass and porcelain across the kitchen floor. That one had been hard to miss, actually. Luckily most of their stuff was cheap as hell, either thrifted or from the Stoughton IKEA.

Stiles and Lydia are far from helpless; they’re not new to this, and more importantly, they share a mutual hatred of having to rely on the spookier members of the pack for help with supernatural issues. Stiles spent an unproductive afternoon at the Boston Public Library only to conclude that nobody had died of suspicious causes in the apartment. Then they’d gone down the usual list of home purification rituals—they saged, they called a Catholic priest and, when that didn’t work, a Mambo vodun priestess and, finally, a Wiccan named Opal Forestheart, who wandered around their rooms with an enormous chalice of water, flicking it on things while Lydia side-eyed her. The next morning, Stiles’ shower turned scalding while his back was turned, and he’d had to stumble out naked and soapy, blinking shampoo out of his eyes and cursing his reddened skin.

Then they’d moved on to the books.

It’s been two months, though, and none of the spells or rituals they’ve found have panned out, so it’s probably time to call in the cavalry. Conveniently, it’s also Christmas, so Stiles is going back to Beacon Hills anyway. Lydia normally comes with him, but this year she’s in charge of a graduate symposium at MIT and has decided to stay in Boston over the break to work on it.

“Fine,” he tells her now. “But if Derek yells at us for not telling them earlier, I’m putting you on speakerphone for it.”

 

 *

 

Four days later, Stiles is at Deaton’s veterinary clinic, coming clean.

“And that’s it,” he finishes. “Mostly it’s been active at night… nothing dangerous, really, but it’s getting annoying.” Deaton looks considering. Next to him, Derek crosses his arms, scowling at Stiles. Stiles rolls his eyes back, and very carefully does not check out Derek’s forearms even though the sleeves of his cashmere sweater are pushed up and all that tanned skin is _right there_. The clinic is hung with festive garlands of what Stiles is pretty sure is real mistletoe, just in case Deaton has to kill an intruder over the holidays. It has, sadly, happened before. The plants are well above animal and toddler-height, which shows Deaton's typical careful forethought. Stiles is very jet-lagged, but Derek drove him straight here from the airport, because they’ve been out of high school for five years but some things don’t change: Derek Hale still has no chill about the well-being of his pack. 

“Well, I may have some books for you,” Deaton says finally. “I’ll look them over in the morning, and you can make copies of the rituals that look useful before you head back.”

“Thanks, Doc,” Stiles says.

In Derek’s car, he texts Lydia. It’s late back on the East Coast, but he knows she’ll be up anyway.

_hows our friend?_

_Taking the holiday off, apparently. He’s been laying low since you left_ , she texts back.

 _pretty sexist of u to assume it’s a he_ , Stiles replies, biting back a smirk. Derek glances at him before returning his gaze to the dark road ahead of them. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and the streets are illuminated by multicolored lights and enormous inflatable Santas. Beacon Hills does get snow, but this year is unseasonably warm, especially compared to Massachusetts. Derek has the Camaro’s windows rolled down.

 _Only a man could be this annoying_ , Lydia snipes back. Stiles snorts, sliding his phone back into his pocket.

“She okay?” Derek asks.

“Yeah,” Stiles answers. “She says the apartment’s been quiet today.”

“Hmm,” Derek says. “Are you—” Whatever he’s about to ask gets lost as a dark shape darts out onto the road in front of them. Derek’s werewolf instincts kick in and he hits the brakes, yanking the wheel at the same time to force the car into a spin that makes Stiles’ stomach lurch. Derek throws his arm across Stiles’s chest, keeping him pinned against his seat more securely than even his seat belt.

Then, suddenly, it’s all over—the Camaro stops, tires squealing, perpendicular to the double yellow lines. They both watch as the deer bolts off into the underbrush on the far side of the road.

“Holy shit,” Stiles says breathlessly. His heart is hammering, jet lag banished by the adrenaline flooding his system. “I can’t believe you just soccer-mom armed me.”

“You okay?” Derek tears his wide-eyed gaze from the woods to lock onto Stiles’ face.

“I’m fine,” Stiles reassures him. “Seriously, your arm is like, iron.” He pokes at it experimentally and Derek pulls back, abrupt like he forgot it was still locked across Stiles’ chest. Derek’s sweater is very soft. It’s hard to tell in the darkness, but it looks like his face is red. The thought makes Stiles flush as well, and he clears his throat awkwardly. His heart is still racing, somewhere in the vicinity of his throat.

“I would like to go to bed now,” he says. Derek makes a choking noise and Stiles reddens further. “I mean, it’s late—I’m—it’s like, midnight in Boston right now—I’m just very tired,” he finishes, rather desperately. 

“Right,” Derek says, “of course.” He pulls the car back into the correct lane and they spend the rest of the drive to Stiles’s dad’s house in awkward silence. Stiles goes to sleep that night in his childhood bed, glaring at the glow-in-the-dark stars he stuck onto his ceiling in seventh grade and wondering why pseudo-adulthood hasn’t fixed his inability to do anything about his stupid, enormous crush on Derek Hale.

 

Stiles startles awake hours later. At first he isn’t sure what wakes him. His bedroom is dark and still, silent except for the sound of his own quiet breathing. The alarm clock next to his bed reads 3:14. He lies there for a long moment, listening hard, before he hears it: tinny laughter, a high-pitched electronic ringing just at the edge of his hearing. It’s another moment before he can identify the source. The television in the living room is on.

Frowning, Stiles stumbles downstairs. He’s half asleep, his brain moving too slowly to make sense of things, but now that he’s heard it he knows he won’t be able to fall back asleep until he turns it off. His dad’s at the station tonight, and even if he’d come home early, he wouldn’t be watching TV. He’s not a television kind of guy, unless he and Stiles are watching a movie or there’s a Giants game on. Whatever’s playing, it isn’t sports. It sounds familiar but Stiles can’t quite place it.

When he reaches the foot of the stairs, the living room is aglow with light that flickers over the empty couch and catches on the glass of the framed photos on the wall. It’s almost painful after the darkness upstairs and Stiles has to squint against it while his eyes adjust. The TV is showing a crowded roomful of people, chattering and milling around, an open dance floor in the foreground. The image is grainy, shaky like it’s being filmed with a handheld camcorder. Stiles is frozen by the stairs, a growing sense of horror rooting him in place. His heart is pounding. The crowd quiets, their buzz replaced by a rich, clear voice. 

 _I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places_ , Billie Holiday sings _._ The sound is distant, like it’s echoing from the end of a very long tunnel. On the television screen, Stiles’s parents dance. They’re mostly swaying in place, off-rhythm but too happy to care. His mom’s face is flushed and glowing, her brown hair loose around her shoulders, still curly from the up-do he’s seen in their wedding photos. His dad leans in and whispers something in her ear and she laughs so hard she nearly trips him. Her mouth is open in the same wide grin that Stiles catches in the mirror sometimes.

He’s seen it in the back of the living room bookshelf—a VHS tape in its battered plastic case, his babcia’s round writing on the spine: _John & Claudia, 1994. _It's their old wedding video; he knows because he heard his dad watching it one year, on the anniversary of her death. Stiles had been eleven, and the sound of his dad crying was utterly foreign. It had dropped something heavy and painful into his chest, an ache that’s never quite left. He’d slipped out the back door as quietly as he could and run the seven blocks to the McCall house, where Scott’s father’s yelling was at least better than those awful, broken sounds.

Stiles forces himself to move, bypassing the remote that sits on the coffee table in favor of running his fingers almost frantically over the side of the television, looking for the power button. He finds it and presses it with a sense of relief. Nothing happens. On the screen, his parents keep dancing. _I'll find you in the morning sun, and when the night is new,_ swears Billie. _I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you._ Stiles pushes it again, and again, with the same lack of result. He’s about to fumble desperately for the plug when a loud crack echoes through the room and the television goes dark so abruptly that an afterimage of it floats in his vision, a glowing, suspended rectangle. 

His breath sounds thunderous in the suddenly-silent living room. Every single one of his senses is straining. He becomes aware of the whir of someone’s sprinklers, forgotten as the weather turned cooler. Somewhere a dog barks once and then again before falling quiet. The silence stretches out around him like a thick blanket of tension.

It’s as he’s heading back towards the stairs that he sees the source of the noise: one of the framed photos has fallen off the wall and is lying on the floor. Its glass is cracked, a long fracture splitting his mom’s smiling face in half. A four year old Stiles is perched on her lap, unharmed.

 

The next morning, his dad is forking scrambled eggs into his mouth when Stiles enters the kitchen.

“Hey, Dad,” he asks, keeping his tone casual. “Did you get home early last night?”

His dad shakes his head. “I wish.” A yawn punctuates his words. “Martinez’s kid was sick so I let him head out early and stuck around to finish his shift. Why?”

“Just thought I heard something,” Stiles says vaguely, and changes the subject. When the sheriff heads upstairs for a nap a few minutes later, Stiles checks the bookshelf in the living room. The tape is there, undisturbed in its case, covered in dust. It looks like it hasn’t been touched in years. 

They made a serious miscalculation, Stiles realizes that afternoon, watching with trepidation as his bedroom blinds shutter open and closed of their own accord. Because the weirdness seemed to effect them both, they’d assumed that whatever was behind it was tied to the apartment. But now that he thinks about it, most of the mischief had been centered on _him_ , not on Lydia. And if it’s not some random, place-based haunting, then. Then there’s a chance that it’s personal.

It’s Christmas Eve, a night that he and his dad have spent with the McCalls ever since his mom died and Scott’s dad left. In the last few years, dinner has expanded to include most of the pack—Allison and Chris always attend, and Lydia when her parents are traveling, plus Isaac, who’s been a regular at the McCall house since he moved in during their last years of high school. Derek usually shows, though he takes a lot of convincing (or a little, if it’s Stiles doing the wheedling), but Boyd and Erica both have their own families; Erica’s in Spain this year, and Boyd is across town with his parents and sisters. It’s one of Stiles’ favorite holidays: everyone squeezed around the too-small dining room table, knocking elbows and poaching food from each others’ plates. This year, though, Stiles is distracted. He feels distant from everyone. The back of his neck is prickling and he finds himself zoning out, gaze fixated on one of the curtains, which is swaying slightly even though the window behind it is closed. Stiles is maybe imagining it. None of the werewolves are reacting, anyway, and their senses usually work like supernatural motion detectors.

“Earth to Stiles,” Allison says, laughing a little as she waves a hand in front of his face. He blinks, mentally shaking himself.

“You’re like, a thousand miles away, bro,” says Scott. At the other end of the table, Derek looks at him with a worried expression.

“Just tired,” he says, which is technically true. He hadn’t been able to fall back asleep last night, instead spending hours sitting upright in bed until the sky started to lighten and he’d fallen into an uneasy doze. When he finally roused himself, every single light in his bedroom had been switched on.

 

*

 

On Christmas morning, just as they finish unwrapping gifts, his dad gets called into work. This isn’t unusual. Being the sheriff means that he rarely gets a holiday to himself. Stiles is feeling rested after eight hours of uninterrupted sleep; either whatever is haunting him really did take the holiday off, or the four glasses of wine he and Allison each consumed last night knocked him out thoroughly enough that he slept through any weirdness.

 _merry xmas_ , he texts Lydia, and then, after a moment’s thought, attaches a link to SNL’s “Dick in a Box” skit. She sends back the Santa emoji, accompanied by a middle finger.

Stiles flops on the couch for a while. He picks up all the wrapping paper, and takes out the trash. _Home Alone_ is playing on the television. He can’t shake the feeling that there’s something in the room with him, watching him carefully. He thinks about texting Scott, but doesn’t want to intrude on his time with Melissa. He thinks about texting Derek, who he’s pretty sure is doing nothing, and who also pressed his warm knee against Stiles’s as they sat squeezed onto the McCall sofa last night. As he sits up to grab his phone again, his gaze catches on the photo of his mother, hung carefully back up on the wall. The crack is still there and he stares at it for a long moment before going in search of the keys to his Jeep.

The cemetery is empty, which is not a surprise given that it’s Christmas day. Wilting red poinsettias and wicker baskets of fake flowers dot the grave sites. The grass is browned, and it’s warm enough in the sun that Stiles sweats a little in his flannel shirt. He spends almost an hour sitting by his mother’s headstone, tearing idly at the weeds and trying to think of something to say to her that won’t sound either stupid or insane. “I miss you,” he ends up saying, which is cliché but better than the alternatives: _Christmas is unbearable now, even though I love my friends._

_I’m still angry that you left us._

_I think you might be haunting me._

When his ass grows numb from sitting on the hard-packed ground, Stiles hauls himself to his feet and heads back to his Jeep. _whatcha up to?_ he texts Derek as he gets in, then tosses his phone on the passenger seat to start the ignition.

The motor turns over once, twice, and then dies. Stiles makes a dismayed face and tries again, with no luck. “Aughh,” he says aloud, and then hops back out to pop the hood. He’s not a mechanic, but the Jeep dies often enough that he’s had to learn how to do minor roadside repairs. Cars speed by on the freeway just a few hundred feet from him.

After fifteen minutes of poking around, he can find nothing amiss. He’s about to admit defeat and call Derek for a jump when a light in the window of the cemetery administrative building draws his eye. This cemetery is bigger than the one Isaac’s father owned. Even though it’s run by the county, the central building doubles as a privately-owned mortuary. There are a few other cars in the parking lot, though the graveyard itself had appeared empty; it’s not impossible that some overworked administrator is inside, with jumper cables Stiles can borrow. Not impossible, just super depressing. Stiles decides to try his luck anyway, though he makes sure to pocket a baggie of mountain ash and a canister of mace from the Jeep’s center console before he goes, because he’s not an idiot.

The building is made of old, yellowed adobe. When he tries the door, it creaks open easily. 

Inside, the entryway looks like every funeral home he’s ever been in: a dusty Persian carpet on the floor, held down by heavy, dark wooden furniture. He remembers it from his mother’s service, remembers holding his dad’s hand tightly, palm clammy and eyes puffy from crying. The sconces on the walls are turned on, which Stiles counts as a positive sign. “Hello?” he calls, and then winces. Shouting inside a funeral home feels fundamentally wrong. He makes his way further into the building, sticking his head into receiving rooms and what must be the funeral director’s office. They’re all empty, although the computer on the director’s desk is turned on, cursor blinking over an Excel spreadsheet like someone just stood up from it to get a fresh cup of coffee.

As he’s resigning himself to using his Phone-a-Friend lifeline, he hears a noise coming from the stairwell at the end of the main hallway. He takes the stairs two at a time and finds himself in the basement level. Three metal tables are positioned in the center of the room and the temperature is significantly cooler than the upper floor. It’s the mortuary, he realizes, and immediately feels creeped out. But there’s definitely someone down here—the noise comes again, from an illuminated doorway on the far side of the room. When his tentative greeting goes unanswered he eases his way through the threshold.

The room is smaller than he expected, and Stiles knows immediately that he’s made a mistake. He spins around, just a second too late; the door slams shut before he can reach out to stop it. When he twists the handle, it doesn’t move. It’s locked.

The room is the size of a walk-in closet, and despite the noises Stiles heard, it’s empty. This is a blessing, Stiles knows. The room is clearly meant to function as cadaver storage. A large open shelving unit takes up one wall, like a triple bunk bed; when Stiles stretches out a shaky hand, he discovers that each shelf rolls out from the wall on well-oiled casters. The room is very, very cold.

His phone is still lying where he tossed it, on the passenger seat of the Jeep.

 

For a while, he entertains himself with yelling and beating on the door, on the infinitesimally small chance that there really is someone out there and that this entire nightmare wasn’t just a long con on the part of whatever’s haunting him. He knows better. What he’s just done—followed a trail of disembodied sounds into the basement of a funeral home and right into a cold storage chamber—these are not the actions of someone thinking clearly. Surviving high school in Beacon Hills taught Stiles an even greater degree of self-preservation than he had to begin with. He would never have done this normally. He would have stayed in the Jeep and waited for Derek, and then bullied him into stopping for Chinese takeout on the way back home.

Now, he’s staying in the body freezer. Possibly permanently, unless someone figures out where he is soon.

When it becomes inescapably clear that there’s nobody in the other room to hear him, he takes stock. The door hinges on the outside, and it’s perfectly flush with the jamb, probably to keep the cold air sealed inside. He won’t be able to force it open. The vents are small, only a few inches wide. Other than the shelving unit, the room is bare. There’s nowhere to sit that doesn’t leech the warmth from his skin, from his bones; the walls are cold, the floor is colder, and Stiles refuses to even think about fitting himself onto one of the shelves. He tells himself it’s because they’re metal and will also be cold. The flannel shirt he’s wearing might as well be tissue paper. He has the keys to the Jeep in one pocket and the mace and mountain ash in the other, all of which are useless.

Nobody knows where he is; his dad won’t leave the station until late afternoon at the earliest, and even then he’ll assume that Stiles is with Scott. Scott will assume he’s with Derek, and Derek will assume he’s with his dad. It could be nighttime by the time anyone realizes he’s missing, and Green Acres cemetery is far from the first place they’ll check. Probably Stiles has been in worse situations than this. None come to mind immediately, but Stiles is sure they exist.

Eventually he finds himself curled against the far wall, his arms tucked close to his chest and his knees pulled up against them. His teeth are chattering violently. He has the vague idea that the freezer is even colder than it should be, though he’s never spent time in cold storage so he doesn’t know if that’s true. What he does know a lot about is hypothermia, thanks to a late-night Wikipedia binge following the ice bath he, Allison, and Scott had taken in Deaton’s clinic years ago. _No paradoxical undressing_ , Stiles tells himself sternly as he shakes against the wall, _and definitely no terminal burrowing_. _Death with dignity, you fucking idiot._

Time passes. Freezing to death is boring, it turns out. For a while he talks, in case whatever’s haunting him is listening. The door does not miraculously swing open, not even when Stiles threatens to start singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” After a while he falls silent, freaked out by the sound of his own shuddering voice and drawn into a kind of vacant stare at the thin sliver of space at the bottom of the door. It looks like shadows are moving beyond it. They’re mesmerizing, and he loses time watching them shift back and forth. Is someone outside?

“H-hey,” Stiles tries. He’s trembling almost too hard for the word to make it out; it gets trapped behind his chattering teeth and his clumsy tongue. No answer comes, which makes sense because there is nobody there.

Hours pass. He doesn’t notice. Stiles becomes dimly, distantly aware that he’s stopped shivering. He knows that’s bad. It’s hard to care. For the first time in hours his body isn’t wracked by bone-jarring spasms that feel like they’ll shake him apart. He can’t feel the cold. He can’t feel much of anything, actually. Each blink feels like an eternity and the periods of darkness in between grow longer and longer.

It would be easy, so easy, to let his eyes slip shut.

“Nope,” he says aloud, or tries to. His voice isn’t working right. He tries to move his fingers to his throat to check if his vocal cords are vibrating, if he can still feel his pulse, but they’re so stiff he can’t uncurl them. He’s struck by the certainty that if he tried any harder, they’d snap off from his hands, like icicles or twigs. There’s frost on his eyelashes, where the condensation from his breath has frozen. He blinks again, heavily.

He feels like he’s sinking, like his entire body is going to phase right through the floor in a slow, heavy drift. Under the door the shadows are moving again. He doesn’t want to look at them anymore. There’s an awful metallic sound, screeching and violent, and then hands are fisted in Stiles’s shirt. He can’t feel them but he blinks again, and yes. Hands. He tries to follow them up, makes it as far as wrists before they move to frame his face. He can’t feel them there, either.

“Stiles,” someone is saying, “Stiles, Jesus Christ—”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stiles wakes up. He’s shivering again, endless juddering shakes running from his spine all the way down to his fingers and toes as his muscles spasm over and over again. He watches his fingertips slide jerkily across the mattress by his face.

 

Stiles wakes up. He’s warm, so meltingly hot he’s actually sweating. It’s dark and he can’t see anything. Can’t move. The heavy warmth is bone-deep. It drags him back under.

 

Stiles wakes up. There’s a weight pressing him into a soft mattress. He stays conscious long enough to determine that it’s Derek, but dozes back off before he can make sense of anything else. Derek’s there, so he’s safe.

 

Stiles wakes up. This time, he stays awake. He’s buried under a mountain of blankets and quilts, and the weight of them is comforting and suffocating all at once. Derek’s chest is plastered against his back, arms locked around his waist, one thigh slipped between Stiles’s own. There is a lot of skin-on-skin contact happening. Stiles knows what’s going on; he’s seen this episode before. Thankfully, he’s pretty sure he’s still got boxers on.

“Hey, Derek,” he says. His voice sounds scraped raw and he has to swallow uncomfortably. The warm body behind his shifts, pushing at his shoulders until he rolls over. His muscles scream a full-body protest. He feels like a noodle.

“I’m going to kill you,” Derek informs him. His face is pinched and worried looking. Stiles wrestles an arm free from the sheets to push at Derek’s eyebrows with one finger, smoothing out his frown. Derek bats his hand away, catching it in his own broad one and dragging it back into the warm pocket of air beneath the blankets.

Stiles ignores the threat with the ease of long practice. “So, great news,” he announces. “I know what The Thing is. It’s a poltergeist. Attached to me, not the apartment.”

“We know,” Derek tells him. “Allison and Deaton took care of it.”

“What?” Stiles says. He wants to sit up in surprise but is genuinely uncertain if his muscles will allow it.

“You’ve been passed out for almost nine hours.”

“ _What_.”

“Moderate hypothermia, verging on severe.”

“Okay, that I knew,” Stiles admits. He swallows again. Derek passes him a bottle of water from somewhere in the nest of blankets and he drains half of it. “How did you know—how did you find me?”

“Lydia called me,” Derek says tightly. “Screaming.”

Stiles winces. “Sorry,” he says. Lydia hates going banshee, mostly because unless she can get to a pillow in time, the cops usually show up. He’ll be hearing about this for months.

They’re quiet for a long, endless moment, facing each other on the bed. The lamp on the side table turns the room dim, filled with soft shadows. Outside Derek’s bedroom window, the sky is dark; it must be nighttime. Derek’s eyes are very, very green. His thumb rubs back and forth across Stiles’s hip, probably unconsciously.  

“I thought it might be my mom.” The words come out quiet. Flat. “Stupid, of course.”

Derek shakes his head a little. “Not stupid,” he says. “I get it.” Stiles looks at him. Derek, who apparently spent nine hours in bed with him radiating werewolf body heat until Stiles’s breakable human body could produce its own again. Derek, who looks a little lost every Christmas, a little grateful when Stiles drags him to the McCalls on Christmas Eve. Derek, who must have ripped a stainless steel door off its hinges to get to Stiles. “I couldn’t hear your heartbeat,” Derek says, like he can read minds. “Your pulse was too slow, and the door—”

Stiles grabs Derek’s hand where it rests on his side and pulls it up to his neck, positioning Derek’s fingers over the thin skin below his ear, where his pulse beats steadily. "I'm okay," Stiles says. Derek’s eyes slip closed, the pads of his fingers pressing even closer to Stiles’s skin as he feels the blood move beneath it. With his face like that, relaxed and vulnerable, long eyelashes throwing shadows across his cheeks, it seems natural for Stiles to lean forward and kiss him. Derek’s mouth opens under his easily, his hand slipping from Stiles’s neck to cradle his face and stroke over his cheekbone. When Stiles finally pulls back to look at him, Derek is smiling. It’s small, tucked into the corner of his mouth and lighting up his eyes.

“Would you look at that,” Stiles says, smiling back. “It’s a Christmas miracle.”  


End file.
